Someone once told me that when you give birth to a daughter, you've just met the person whose hand you'll be holding the day you die.

There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

There is a place in you that you don't even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.

You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.

This was the reason there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that didn't have words big enough to describe them.

I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.